Monday, April 28, 2008

No Comment Necessary

I do believe they miss Dmitri Young. I believe he could provide an occasional spark if given a chance to start in left field. In all my years in Washington, Young is the only player who makes a difference just by his presence alone.

You might've missed it, but Dmitri did play some left in spring training. Here's a picture of him ranging back for a lazy fly.

Glad you caught that one as well. I read that earlier but didn't want to trash Ladson on your blog.Seriously though, could his head be any further in the sand? Young had no range at first base and Ladson wants him chasing balls in left field? Thank goodness Barry gets the scoop most of the time, because Ladson's stuff is unreadable.

That was the first mail bag in around two months and also the first since John Patterson got cut without even a press release being available on the Nats official site.

Given that this provoked an almost unprecedented amount of responses on Capitol Punishment, you would've thought Ladson would at least devote some of the mailbag to this, but alas the press blackout continues (Putin will be along soon to seek advice on how to ignore opinions)

Young in LF? Ladson has clearly developed a wry sense of humour there, he wasn't that good in the outfield in St Louis and things have declined since then. Besides, Justin Maxwell?

Kearns still in the starting line-up? Because he's a Bowden signing, see also Lopez's travails last year and how quickly he's got his starting job back when Belliard had a few bad games.

Great that Ladson also decides to tell us he is on speaking terms again with someone who has no more relavence in the Nationals orgainisation than Michael O' Connor.

Chris, i have vowed NEVER to read another Ladson mailbag after his predicting Zimmy to go .340/40/125, but then you sneak a semi-identifiable link in there and i get sucked in! full disclosure in the future for us dummies in the future please!

I think you're stuck in a 1998 concept of what an Internet petition is all about.

In addition to the volume of names it generates behind an idea, it builds a list of people who can be reactivated to do more. Look at the amount of money that Obama and Dean raised or the GOTV work and rally turn out that Move On can do. Those lists started with internet petitions. It's a low-bar first step to affiliating with a cause, and then people can be activated at a higher level.

I don't know that there's as sophisticated an organizing effort behind this particular effort, but to dismiss Internet petitions in a blanket way as faux activism I think shows a lack of understanding of how powerful the Internet has become as a political organizing tool. It would be like saying a huge mailing list or a huge phone list of activists isn't valuable or important.

And besides I think you're too quick to poo-poo the value of a person adding their name to a political position or cause--yeah a letter or a call or a riot or an assassination attempt says more than a petition, but there are good reasons in a democracy to respect the former forms of expression over the latter.

Of course Selig won't respond to this out of pressure, since MLB is exempted from anti-trust laws and therefore has a completely unchecked monopoly over all things baseball. If it was football, we could start a competing league with no DH, replays in the stadium, reasonably priced beer, no juice, bleacher seats under $47, some semblance of competitive balance, and we'd even allow fans of a team to watch that team's games! But this is baseball, and Monopoly League Baseball controls everything.

But maybe just maybe if enough people sign this petition someone in MLB will realize that it's in their interest to allow people to consume their product.

The petitiononline.com site (aka Care2) is just a tool for people to use to communicate and organize. Whether the people behind this effort have a plan to use the names they collect for anything more than delivering the petition I don't know, but I hope they do. But petitiononline.com is just like blogger.com--it's a handy, user-friendly tool for the netroots. And just like insurgent netroots bloggers are filling an important void in journalism, netroots petitioners and organizers are filling an important void in our politics. That's why I think it's weird that a blogger, especially one as successful as you, would be trashing netroots activism.

Call me a Luddite, but I don't think the political types need any extra help in trying to find suckers...er people to solicit. In the rash days of my youth, I once donated $25 to Ted Kennedy's campaign. His 1980 caampaign against Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination. Since then, despite multiple moves on my part, the party has always been able to track me down and have their guys call me to ask for money or to vote for their guy in every election. Even the obscure off-year Virginia primary elections where the most that's up for grabs is county supervisor. Those guys are doing fine as is, they don't need any more help from me.

In all fairness to Bill Ladson, he doesn't get paid to be a legitimate journalist. His paycheck comes from the consortium of MLB owners and he's basically just an MLB.com hired gun, like the rest of their writers.

While this doesn't obviate him from responsibility for the sheer insanity he writes at times, it certainly helps to explain it. On virtually every issue, Ladson is pretty much editorially responsible to keep a positive perspective on the team and its players. While most self respecting sports writers would rather sever a limb than toe a party line like that, someone has to do it, and were it not Ladson, it would be another guy just trying to earn his meals.

Every single article by Ladson includes this disclaimer: "Bill Ladson is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs." He's not supposed to be a shill for the team

So, one month's worth of fielding data is enough to indicate that Austin Kearns is no longer an elite fielding RF? Really? I'm not sure anyone here is going to buy that. Try selling that over at the Post's comment section.

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